Dissing the Famous:

Gay Michell MEP

by Donal Kennedy.

Mr Mitchell, currently a Fine Gael MEP is an ex-junior minister in a Fine Gael-led Irish government, a former opposition front bencher and a former Lord Mayor of Dublin.

In a letter in the Irish Times of 13 March 1909 he sought to defend the European Defence Agency against an attack by Vincent Browne in an opinion piece in the same paper.

Either Mr Mitchell is totally ignorant of his own party's history or he thinks everyone else is.

I quote:

"The second world war occurred because there was no country, institution or agency in Europe capable of keeping or enforcing the peace against the threat of fascism."

True enough, but what was Fine Gael's attitude to facist aggression and the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany?

When Mussolini's fascists invaded Abyssinia, Eamon de Valera advocated League of Nations sanctions of against Italy. Fine Gael condemned, not the Italian dictatorship but Ireland's elected leader for siding against "Catholic Italy."

John A Costello declared that as the Blackshirts got power in Italy, and Hitler's Brownshirts had taken power in Germany, so assuredly would the Blueshirts triumph in Ireland.

And when the mutinous murderous bandit Franco overthrew the democratically elected government of Spain and its republic, with a little help from his fascist Italian and Nazi German allies, guess what - Fine Gael organised Irishmen from its own deluded ranks to join those jackbooted ruffians.